There Will Be No Alaskan Crab Harvest This Year
Due to dwindling populations of snow and king crabs, the state has canceled this year’s big catch.
In reaction to extremely low Alaskan snow and king crab populations, the state has decided to cancel the fall and winter harvest of the crustaceans for the first time in history.
According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), which officially announced the cancellation earlier this month, the decision came after an analysis of the snow crab stock revealed that only 23 percent of the crab population remains.
The abundance of snow crabs has taken a sharp decline since 2018, when they occupied the Bering Sea off of Alaska in numbers close to eight billion. In 2021, only about one billion of the creatures remained.
At the first signs of the crab decline years ago, researchers originally thought crab migration may be behind the population decrease. Now they’re not so sure. The reasoning behind the intense decline in crab numbers is still being researched, but the findings prove the issue is crab mortality, not mobility. Biologists are pointing to stress from warmer waters and an increase in predators as the cause.
Unlike the never-before-seen cancellation of the snow crab harvest, this fall marks the second year in a row that crabbers are prohibited from harvesting king crab in Alaskan waters. The kibosh on the king crab harvest is due to a low number of mature female crabs—high numbers of mature females are used as a marker of a healthy population of the crab species—which has been in a years-long decline.
The choice to cancel the 2022 harvest season is a huge blow to crabbers, who rely on the annual harvests to keep up with the demand of the crabbing industry, which is worth close to $200 million. The harvest shutdown will likely result in some crabbers being forced out of business.
In its official statement, the ADF&G acknowledged the strain this harvest cancellation would put on crabbers and industry stakeholders, but it held that the overall conservation of crab species had to come first.
“Understanding crab fishery closures have substantial impacts on harvesters, industry, and communities, ADF&G must balance these impacts with the need for long-term conservation and sustainability of crab stocks. Management of Bering Sea snow crab must now focus on conservation and rebuilding given the condition of the stock,” the statement reads.
Follow us
Republish!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
-
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
-
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
-
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
-
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
-
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
-
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
-
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].There Will Be No Alaskan Crab Harvest This Year
by Shea Swenson, Modern Farmer
October 20, 2022
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
Submit
How do we know if the crabs are being illegally fished by China or some other country??
Don’t you think when there is an ice age the crabs are moving south, brrrrrrrr!